A weight about the size of a small apple hangs from a thread hundreds of times thinner than a human hair. The thread doesn't snap and barely interferes with the weight's swinging. This setup is the heart of a new lab scale for measuring gravitational attraction.

Ordinary gravity scales suffer from jitter: heat makes their parts vibrate, and precision drops. Here, the thread is made of silicon nitride, a material that dampens unwanted oscillations. The weight swings on the thread like a pendulum, and its motion depends only on the attraction of nearby objects.

Such a scale sits on a table to measure how two bodies attract each other. If made sensitive enough, it could pick up quantum effects of gravity — something currently seen only in science fiction. For now, this is a first step: the largest silicon nitride thread that holds such a load while barely hindering its swing.